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A review by casparb
The Sickness Unto Death by Alastair Hannay, Søren Kierkegaard
4.0
I don't know how he does it but I am so seduced each time I visit the Dane. Kierkegaard is a sharp writer, far more literary than we are used to in philosophy. This is true here, but he's also cheeky.
The book opens with: 'Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation's relating to itself.' This is kind of a famous quotation, and it is remarkable purely from the perspective of sentence construction, but it is, as I say, rather cheeky. 'Spirit' is seen as specific to the individual. I'm sure that can be quite upsetting. Wild to see K elsewhere in the text begin to articulate something that very much resembles the superego. Exquisite-
It's hard to resist seeing K as a sort of anti-Nietzsche, or a Nietzschean shadow is perhaps more accurate. The shadow that precedes the object. A ghost indeed- a specter, haunting.
The book opens with: 'Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation's relating to itself.' This is kind of a famous quotation, and it is remarkable purely from the perspective of sentence construction, but it is, as I say, rather cheeky. 'Spirit' is seen as specific to the individual. I'm sure that can be quite upsetting. Wild to see K elsewhere in the text begin to articulate something that very much resembles the superego. Exquisite-
It's hard to resist seeing K as a sort of anti-Nietzsche, or a Nietzschean shadow is perhaps more accurate. The shadow that precedes the object. A ghost indeed- a specter, haunting.